Stanley Cup gets star treatment in OC

Sure, it's been filled with beer, champagne and other celebratory beverages and fondled by throngs of hockey players and fans alike for more than 100 years, but Justin Frady wouldn't touch it.

He stood, stunned, in front of the Stanley Cup on Tuesday morning, one of the first of some 600 employees at the Irvine office for Discover Home Loans that had a chance to see the trophy in person.

"It was more glorious than I thought it would be," he said after.

The tall metal trophy – likely jet-lagged from a flight the night before from Toronto with a ticket to fly to Saskatoon, Canada later that day – sat on a table inside Discover's Irvine office building off Technology Drive, offered as a photo-opportunity for employees. Discover sponsors the intermissions for NHL's televised matches.

"People act like kids when they get in front of the cup," said Joe Curtis, director of sponsorships for Discover, who said the Cup gets passed around to a few of the company's offices year to year.

Wearing a Bruins jersey, Frady said he didn't want to destroy the Cup's honor that dictates only those who win the hockey championship have a right to touch it.

As far as employee perks go, nothing matched seeing the Cup, he said.

"This is it. This is the best," he said.

Traveling alongside the trophy has been the self-described keeper of the Cup, Phil Pritchard, more officially the vice president and curator of the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto who poses for photos, volunteers trivia and enthusiastically points to a few quirks etched on the trophy's exterior.

The name, for one, is just a nickname. It's officially called the Dominion Challenge Hockey Cup, he said. When a mistaken name has been etched onto the surface, it's literally been X'ed over, not erased. Then there was the time the assistant manager for the Montreal Canadiens of 1955-56 became "ass man" thanks to an unfortunate abbreviation job.

The Cup travels in a non-descript black crate lined with a purple velvet material and flies commercial. Pritchard said he was once stopped on a Canadian tarmac by the plane's pilots who wanted to pose for pictures, and asked if he could walk it through the plane's galley for the other passengers.

Its tour slows after May 30, though, as the Cup waits for the latest team of players that bests the rest, earning the right to hoist the trophy above their heads.

Pritchard, standing to the side Tuesday watching fans crowd around the Cup, touch it, in one case place a newborn inside, said he doesn't worry about anything happening to the trophy.

"In most of these, they're die-hard, passionate hockey fans," he said. "We're in good company."